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Thursday, 1 March 2018

Snow and Blinking Boilers

Like tiny airborne ballerinas,Snowflakes flit and flutter through sunbeams.The Earth holds its breath.

It's snowing!

This may not seem exciting to everyone, but I live in a part of the world where it doesn't snow often. In the six winters we've had in this building, only one other year did snow settle - and then it was only a dusting.

This morning, I woke up to the most snow I've seen since I left uni.

I was working from home today, and the flat was cold (more on that in a bit), so the Cat did the sensible thing and sat on the radiator to watch the snowfall.

A few dustings in the morning, then in the afternoon it really started to come down, distracting me from my work to take a photo.

I've never seen the gravel covered before, so was very excited. By the time I'd finished for the day, it was even deeper!

I wasn't working from home out of fear of the snow, but because I felt icky yesterday and went home early - to find our boiler had gone out. It was showing a fault code Google revealed to be an ignition fault. I phoned out a plumber (relieved I'd come home early and this wasn't an out-of-hours call), and it turned out to be that the condensate pipe had frozen. He defrosted it using our kettle and said they could come out and fit a larger condensate pipe... I wrinkled my nose, and explained we should be moving soon but our buyers had messed us around and knocked a load of money of the price because they know we've found a place we love and are under pressure to get in there. So we're a bit too skint to be paying for work that isn't urgent. He understood, and said it sound like exactly the sort of thing that could end up their problem (I don't feel too guilty leaving it for them: for one, they really have messed us around and made me very ill in the process; for two, this is the first time we've had a problem in the years we've lived here).

I liked the plumber, because as soon as Cat came over he reached down to scritch her ears, and when he restarted the boiler he said it might have been damaged by the ice - but it made a few clunking, whirring noises that I said sounded promising, and he agreed, and Cat mewed so he asked her what she thought.

Woke this morning, and the boiler had gone out again and it was very cold. A different error code flashed, but I'd noticed the day before it was also an ignition fault so I assumed it was the same thing. A couple of kettles and a reset later, and the boiler kicked into gear in time for him to have a shower. I've run hot water over the pipe every couple of hours (and only fallen over once), and Husbit bought some insulation for the pipe, so hopefully we'll be ok overnight...

Had to clear Cat's litter tray, so stamped out to the bins and carefully stepped back in my bootprints because it amuses me to image someone seeing and being confused. Then I jumped from a patch of gravel sheltered by the house and back, to leave good, solid prints. That was fun too.

And now it sounds like it's raining, so there may not be any snow left in the morning. It's been nice to enjoy it while it lasted.